Mars Back on NASA's Radar

WASHINGTON -- When it comes to sending spacecraft to Mars, NASA has been as about successful recently as Al Gore's attempts to catch up with George W. Bush in the polls.

First NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter in October 1999. Math errors spun the craft into the wrong trajectory, and it was never heard from again.

Then the $165 million Mars Polar Lander died a mysterious death a few months later, apparently crashing into a canyon and touching off an embarrassing landslide of accusations between NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin.

A year later, the embattled U.S. government agency seems to have found its space legs once again.

On Thursday, NASA announced a 20-year plan to send robotic landers to crawl the surface of Mars and remote-controlled balloons or airplanes to explore the Red Planet's skies.

That means six missions over the next decade, including a 2005 launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which scientists predict will be able to record images of surface objects as small as Tupperware containers.

It's scaled back from an earlier, more ambitious scheme that would have sent missions every 26 months, when Mars' orbit is aligned with Earth's. This plan envisions launches every four years instead. But that doesn't seem to worry the smiling NASA officials who turned out for a press conference Thursday at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

"It's not just the Mojave desert. It's an alien world full of surprises," said Scott Hubbard, NASA's Mars program director.

A more terrestrial surprise came earlier this month, when a Republican-controlled Congress decided to write a check to NASA for $14.29 billion. That's $633 million more than the agency received last year, and $250 million more than the Clinton administration had requested.

President Clinton this week signed the spending bill, which funds NASA for the fiscal year beginning this month.

"The Congress knows that it is performance that counts, and this budget is a tribute to NASA's performance," NASA chief Dan Goldin said at the time.

If performance does count in Washington -- a debatable suggestion at best -- dramatic discoveries are still the best way to capture the attention of the public. A recent one sure did. In June, NASA said that photographs from the Mars Global Surveyor, in orbit around the planet, suggested that wet spots had been found on the Mars' surface.

Mars has plenty of solid water in its polar ice caps and in water vapor in its atmosphere. But if liquid water exists, or did exist, that raises the tantalizing prospect of life -- extant or extinct -- in another world.

NASA's associate administrator, Ed Weiler, said on Thursday the presence of usable water could accelerate plans for a manned mission: The hydrogen in water could be used for fuel, while the oxygen would be used for breathing.

And when might the U.S. government decide to send humans to Mars? "It's not something that's going to happen very quickly," Weiler said.

NASA developed its Mars mission schedule over the last six months, and now says it will begin an 18-month engineering study to figure out how much it will cost. The agency said it is working with the French and Italian government space agencies.

The suggested timeline includes:

2001: Launch of a Mars Odyssey Orbiter, which will continue to map the planet.

2003: Two Mars Exploration Rovers to look for water.

2005: A Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, with the ability to image objects as small as 8 to 12 inches.

2007: A "Scout" mission that could include a balloon or an airplane.

2014: An attempt to collect a sample of Martian soil and rock and return it to the United States. Officials estimate that the total sample size would be between 4 and 6 pounds.